Homework: automating deployment of GNS3

User Instructions

Required information

GNS3 web UI url: http://192.168.0.100:8080/guacamole/
GNS3 web UI login information is created by user at script startup.
Ubuntu username: vagrant
Ubuntu password: vagrant

Setting up the environment

1. Download and install Vagrant from the official download page
2. Download and install VirtualBox from the official download page
3. Restart your PC
4. Enable virtualization in BIOS
5. Open your preferred terminal (cmd, Powershell, bash...) in the folder containing the Vagrantfile
6. Run vagrant init in the terminal
7. Run vagrant up in the terminal
8. Enter your login information when prompted by the script
9. Wait until the deployment finishes
10. Connect to the web GUI
11. When done, end the session with vagrant destroy -f

Development information

Problems during development

• To obtain the latest Guacamole server version, it has to be downloaded from the GitHub instead of the official download page, as version 1.3.0 has errors when compiling.
• Some workarounds had to be made so the configs can be written to their correct locations (see the code)
• Xrdp had to be installed for Guacamole to work (not specified in the documentation)
• Password hashing had to be disabled as openssl likes to mangle the input when writing into the config file

Deployment sequence

• The VM is created
• Login information is acquired from the user
• A shell script is run that configures most other files
• man-db is renoved
• remote repositories are set up
• GNS3 is installed
• Guacamole dependencies are installed
• Apache Tomcat is set up using the following config:

[Unit]
Description=Tomcat 9 servlet container
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=forking

User=tomcat
Group=tomcat

Environment=\"JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64\"
Environment=\"JAVA_OPTS=-Djava.security.egd=file:///dev/urandom -Djava.awt.headless=true\"

Environment=\"CATALINA_BASE=/opt/tomcat/tomcatapp\"
Environment=\"CATALINA_HOME=/opt/tomcat/tomcatapp\"
Environment=\"CATALINA_PID=/opt/tomcat/tomcatapp/temp/tomcat.pid\"
Environment=\"CATALINA_OPTS=-Xms512M -Xmx1024M -server -XX:+UseParallelGC\"

ExecStart=/opt/tomcat/tomcatapp/bin/startup.sh
ExecStop=/opt/tomcat/tomcatapp/bin/shutdown.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

• Guacamole is compiled and installed
• Guacamole login configuration is set up

<user-mapping>

    <!-- Per-user authentication and config information -->

    <!-- A user using md5 to hash the password
         guacadmin user and its md5 hashed password below is used to 
             login to Guacamole Web UI-->
    <authorize 
            username=\"$1\"
            password=\"$2\">

        <connection name=\"Windows Server 2019\">
            <protocol>rdp</protocol>
            <param name=\"hostname\">192.168.0.100</param>
            <param name=\"port\">3389</param>
            <param name=\"username\">vagrant</param>
            <param name=\"ignore-cert\">true</param>
        </connection>

    </authorize>

</user-mapping>

• Xrdp is installed
• Authentication is required to create a color managed device message is surpressed
• Default Ubuntu desktop is installed
• VM is rebooted

Images

• User login information prompt
• Login screen
• RDP login screen
• Ubuntu desktop
• GNS3 app